Give Me Libretto or Give Me Death
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Welcome to Crazy Shopping!

I wrote and recorded these songs between 1971 and 1978 . Back then, my songwriting process was akin to automatic writing, tapping into an emotion and then getting out of the way to let my unconscious mind do its thing. Sometimes, I had no idea what my lyrics meant until later, which could be unexpectedly embarrassing. A song I wrote called, "My First Ship," turned out to be a paean to oedipal loss, not the tongue-in-cheek love ballad for a spaceship I had imagined.

Crazy Shopping is a collection of songs about people who watch their lives through the eyes of strangers, who spend too much time alone in the room upstairs, who long to light a candle in the heart of the night but are too distrustful and easily hurt. Okay, I admit it. The songs were about me in my ‘20s. What did you expect? Hopefully, they're also about you too and also your friends and your Uncle Charlie and his dog Poochie. Especially Poochie.

Originally, I was going to use The Mangled Membrane as the name of my fictional one-man band. I had several explanations for this. First, a membrane makes it possible to convert one kind of energy into another, like the capsule of a microphone or the drums within your ears. I also thought there was something at once absurd and disturbing about something so precise and delicate as a membrane juxtaposed with a crude and brutal concept like mangling. I would go on to say this was a reasonably apt metaphor for what we all experience as we make our ways through life; striving to strike a balance between remaining open and receptive and protecting ourselves and those we love. Letting some things in, keeping others out. Like a membrane.

Of course, this was mostly a load of bunk. The real explanation is less pretentious. I considered this my first “real” album and alluded to this in terms of a girl losing her virginity. It strikes me today as an odd way to communicate this notion. I was not a girl, so why was I framing my debut in terms of being deflowered? And why use a violent word like mangling to describe the process? Decades later, I prefer not to speculate.

In 2007, when I wrote the first version of these liner notes, I concluded my crap explanations with the following paragraph. In honor of the callow me of the late ‘70s, I’ll end with the same words again.

Are these explanations satisfactory? I suspect not. They seemed to make a lot more sense when they came to me in the room upstairs. Still, I hope you’ll come up and visit me there, at least long enough to listen to this CD. Each song is quite different from the others, so if one offends, perhaps another will please; passing through your own membrane to deliver some of the joy and satisfaction I experienced while writing and recording Crazy Shopping. And now, on to the songs.

Eric Block
April 15, 2007/February 10, 2017
Phoenix, Arizona